Twitter is now courting brands by providing them with social listening analytics. In a latest development, Twitter has launched Brand Hub social listening analytics. Reported by Marketing land, Brand Hub is meant to give companies a centralized place to get insights on share of voice trends and the people and audiences talking about their brands on Twitter.

Available to some large brand advertisers and mid-sized businesses in English-speaking countries starting today, Twitter’s Brand Hub is an extension of its existing analytics suite for advertisers, anchored by a measurement metric called TrueVoice.

Twitter informed that TrueVoice shows advertisers their share of conversations happening on the social network. It measures impressions from organic Tweets going back as far as 28 days to show how ad campaigns on the social network and other channels help influence organic brand mentions on Twitter.

Brands also want to keep a tab on competitor performances; Twitter has taken it into consideration by share impressions acquired by their competitors in the past week. Overview dashboard in Brand Hub has a trend chart that tracks a brand’s share of conversation against the competitors’ average for the past week. Competitors are pulled from lists companies make public to the investment community.

Brand Hub’s social listening analytics also offers brands both aggregated data about the people tweeting about a brand — gender, location, occupation, income levels and other demographic information — as well as a list of top influencers. All this data is accumulated in the Audience tab.

Twitter is also tracking top phrases used in tweets about a brand to find sentiment as well as how does the brand stack up against competitors on indicators such as – Saw Ad, Loyalty, Price and Purchase Intent. Twitter identifies Tweets that include keywords related to each of these indicators.

“Every day, millions of people tweet about brands,” according to a Twitter statement about the product. “Each tweet has the potential to give advertisers new insights to better understand what customers, prospects, and influencers are saying, thinking, and feeling about their brand. To date, marketers haven’t been able to gather these valuable insights in one place.”

This is another big announcement that comes from inside the Twitter camp which recently revealed some very promising features at the developer conference. However, over the last few years analytics has evolved rapidly with the help of third party products. Competitor analysis, brand sentiment, etc. are common analytic features that are often found in the established social media listening tools.

Twitter is definitely late here but it possesses a massive historical data. Brand Hub will get brands excited, especially those who crave for analytics in one single dashboard, something Facebook had opened up long back. This is also going to be a good news for small businesses and startups who fail to afford the expensive social media listening tools.